


Rivers Always Reach the Sea

by RurouniHime



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angel Castiel (Supernatural), Angst, BAMF Castiel (Supernatural), Canon Compliant, Dean Winchester Prays to Castiel, Declarations Of Love, Don't copy to another site, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, Heaven, M/M, Memory Loss, Post-Canon, Post-Episode: s15e20 Carry On, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-11 09:00:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28468683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: “What’s wrong with you?” It rushes out of Dean, a wheeze of air. He looks crushed, buckling right in front of Castiel, and his whole self is reaching but not touching Castiel, refusing that one thing that he so clearly wants. “You’re like you were when we first—Don’t you remember?”Castiel thinks back, really tries. The bunker, the pounding at the door. The despair outside and also growing in his chest, that they would fail, that this man, this man who was meant to save the world, would die.“The sacrifice seemed a small gift to give,” he murmurs.“Small?” Dean nearly shouts.“Small?You died for me!”“I’m a soldier. Sometimes it’s necessary.”*(Not everything made it out of the Empty.)
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 61
Kudos: 619
Collections: Angel’s Supernatural favorites





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is already finished. I will post today, tomorrow, and the following day. More tags as I post, but I promise no horrid surprises.
> 
> **Memory Loss tag: I know this can be triggery for people, so please see my end note for a spoilery explanation if you need.**
> 
> This is what I WAS working so diligently on until _Dean Winchester, Social Justice Warrior_ roared in like a rude ass jerk and wrote and posted itself in a single day. Sorry. There's also a sequel to _Nothing Equals the Splendor_ on its way. ^_^ Come chill with me on tumblr! I squee some, I fangirl a lot, and I mess around in a bunch of fandoms. @ thegertie
> 
> Title and opening and closing quotes from _Ten Years Gone_ by Led Zeppelin, which, the lyrics just really feel like Destiel sometimes. [Listen here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBzuYNK95sM).

_Then as it was, then again it will be,  
and though the course may change sometimes,  
rivers always reach the sea._

*  
*  
*

The first prayer is brief.

_Hey, Cas. You there, man?_

Castiel halts the flood of matter from his hands and cocks his head, standing at the newest edge of Heaven.

_I just… Look, you’re probably busy. But. When you’re not? I’m here. I’ll be here._

Then the voice goes quiet and it’s over. 

Castiel goes back to creation.

*

_Cas, you should see my place._

It’s not often, just every once in a while. They come without announcement. Thoughts and snippets, like jotted notes of things Dean Winchester finds interesting. 

_I’ve got a dock, and fish sometimes, though I don’t know if they’re real fish. How does that work here, exactly?_

He’s generally happy, Castiel can feel it. He’s not in need. This is not a prayer for help.

_Anyway. You’re invited. Of course you’re invited. Whenever you can._

* 

It’s nice to hear feedback about the mountains he’s helped to create, the way the coffee tastes in the morning, the finding of family and friends, how the car is _just as it was, man, even the freakin’ scuffs in the vinyl, how did you guys do that?_

Dean is the one who did it, but that explanation will take longer than Castiel has time for. There is so much to do, so many souls for whom he must carve out space. 

Dean is the only one who speaks directly to him, though.

*

Sometimes Dean Winchester is puzzled. 

_This place is weird. Actually, it kind of redefines the word. Yesterday I swear I got a gray hair, but then it was gone. Did I disappear my own gray hair? Did I even have it to begin with or did I just think it up and poof, there it was?_

Humans are concerned about the strangest things.

*

Sometimes he’s laughing.

_Dude, I don’t even know how old I am anymore. It’s like years have passed, and then it’s like moments. Seconds. I think I sat in my bathtub for three days yesterday and didn’t realize. It never even got cold until I started thinking about it, and you know what, that’s some trippy shit, Cas. It’s kind of awesome. Sounds like something you’d come up with. Come on, am I right?_

It’s rhetorical, that Castiel knows. He feels no need to answer.

*

_Cas? Are you there?_

_I miss you._

* 

Finally Castiel has a moment, so he goes, and finds him halfway between a comfortable single-story house and a rundown garage, in ripped jeans and a white t-shirt speckled with grease and oil. It’s a sunny day, but breezy, the wind teasing at the grass, and when the man sees Castiel, he stops like he’s forgotten he was walking. He doesn’t say anything, just looks at Castiel across the space that separates them.

“Hello, Dean,” Castiel says.

“Cas,” Dean murmurs, not quite to him. There’s no one else near enough to talk to. 

Castiel waits, but nothing else is forthcoming. “How may I help you?”

Dean Winchester lets out a sound through his nose. “‘How may I _help_ you’? That’s formal.” He’s smiling now, his face wrinkling appealingly at the corners of his eyes and the edges of his mouth. He looks Castiel up and down, and somehow, that smile widens further. “How the hell are you, Cas?”

The words, even with the blasphemy, are kind: soft as though they might curl around him. Castiel frowns a little. “As well as might be expected,” he says, feeling his way through the words. “There has been a lot to do.”

“I figured.” Dean shoves his hands in his pockets, looking up and around at the house, the grassy field in which it sits and the lake beside it where the water laps gently. Then back to Castiel, where his eyes keep coming to rest. “I didn’t want to interrupt. I’m really glad you’re here, though.”

“I heard your prayers.” Though they confuse him, the directness and the quiet persistence of them.

Dean laughs and rakes a hand through his hair. “Tried not to bother you.” The loose hem of his shirt ripples in the breeze. His cheeks redden; he clears his throat and looks up again. “But I didn’t want to say what I had to say like that. You deserve better. So. I’m glad you came.”

Castiel waits, watching curiously as Dean chews at his lip.

“Whoa, okay. Yeah, I get it, my turn to talk. That’s fair. More than fair. Look, I just wanted you to know.” Dean stops and takes a breath. Looks at the ground. “What you said. What you told me. You know, when the Empty took you.”

It’s a painful memory for Dean, adding a rigidity to his stature that Castiel would rather see gone. Dean Winchester has looked, felt, calm here. At peace. But he struggles with this, whatever is coming.

“I just… Cas, me too, alright? I’ve had some time to think about it. A lot of time. Time’s weird here, I think I said—Okay, just.” He squares his shoulders. “You changed me, too. You made me think of myself differently. You make me see what I’ve never been able to see. Or been willing to see. About me. Because you saw it, and you accepted it. And I don’t—I’m not ungrateful. God, I am not ungrateful, this, Heaven, it’s more than I could ever have hoped for. But I miss you, man. I miss having you around. It hurts, in my chest.” He touches his sternum. “It’s like a part of me is just gone. I want you here, in this Heaven, with me. If that’s what you want, too.”

Castiel isn’t sure what to say, and so says nothing, and Dean swallows into the silence and looks him right in the eye.

“I guess what I’m saying is, you have me. You’ve had me. Okay? And I’m so sorry I couldn’t say it when it counted. When we were both… Well, we’re both here now, and that, I think that counts too. Maybe even more. Hell, all I think about is you, Cas. I love you, too.”

The field falls silent. Only the watery swish of the lake intrudes. Castiel squints into the sunlight where it reflects off the surface. After a long moment, he looks back at his companion.

“Dean,” he says carefully. “I fear there has been... a misunderstanding.”

And Dean frowns at him, not a frown of anger, but of uncertainty. “Cas, you…” He pauses. But this man toppled empires. He has never been one to mince words when he feels they should be said. “You said you loved me.”

Castiel doesn’t understand. There are things he loves, as humans sometimes use the word: his siblings, Heaven, the creations of his father. His father as well, for a time, though that is now… complicated. He loves Jack, his new god. But this, the way this man means it, the way the blood quickens in his veins, the way the intention hides in his voice and judders under his breath, this is not a feeling Castiel would ever profess to. Not one he ever could. It confuses him, unsettles. It’s too alien, and the idea of it is an ill fit. 

“I am not capable of the intimacies you mean.” He tries to be gentle. He has spent enough time with humans, with Dean specifically, to know how words can cut.

Dean blinks. Shakes his head once, slow. “No,” he finally says. “No, I know what you meant. I was there, and then, after, when I—when I died. I got it. Anything I’d missed, I got.”

Castiel knows the phenomenon, of lifting to the higher plane and seeing the web of will and intention spread before you in ways a mortal could never be aware. But this is wrong. This is not the truth of it.

“I’m sorry,” he says simply.

Dean shutters, all at once. The shock is still plain in the set of his shoulders, but the face, the eyes of this corporealized form, go blank. Something intangible retreats, out of Castiel’s reach.

“So, I don’t mean anything to you?” He sounds startled, even though his face is placid, as still as stone. His voice hints at a deep and wan hurt, and Castiel’s discomfort grows.

“Dean,” he says, and stops. It’s as though his words have physically struck the human, the way he recoils. He’s crying, Castiel realizes, too much of a glint in his green eyes. His eyes are a color Castiel knows he has seen nowhere else in all the universe. He ruminates, forgetting, and then draws himself back, wary that he has somehow done more harm.

The man—Dean—looks at him as though... as though he is staring at... 

_Devastation._ The word comes too late. Castiel steps closer, hand raised, unsure whether touch has a place here. And Dean leans away from it. Castiel halts again, but in that second Dean has changed trajectories, is in his grasp, all cool fabric and body heat beneath—and isn’t it strange that a body in Heaven has heat, when there is really no body at all, simply a construct? 

This construct is shaking, violently, shuddering under Castiel’s careful grip. Castiel sniffs the air and finds the scent he remembers, all sun and sore silence, piney with the pleasance of cream and the bitter hint of grease, gun oil, earthly aromas that Dean’s soul has brought with him to this place of repose.

“Dean,” he tries again as Dean sways into him, and perhaps he is hurt somehow, even here. Castiel can find no injury to heal. “We were brothers in arms. We fought side by side. Of course you have meaning to me.”

Dean wrenches away, and Castiel mistakes it for anger before he sees it as the stumble it was, the nearly lost footing. Dean covers his eyes briefly with his hand, and when he lowers it, he looks _old,_ old like sometimes Castiel feels.

“You are the righteous man,” he tries. Every word does more damage.

“What’s wrong with you?” It rushes out of Dean, a wheeze of air. He looks crushed, buckling right in front of Castiel, and his whole self is reaching but not touching Castiel, refusing that one thing that he so clearly wants. “You’re like you were when we first—Don’t you remember?”

Castiel thinks back, really tries. The bunker, the pounding at the door. The despair outside and also growing in his chest, that they would fail, that this man, this man who was meant to save the world, would die. 

“The sacrifice seemed a small gift to give,” he murmurs.

“Small?” Dean nearly shouts. _“Small?_ You died for me!”

“I’m a soldier. Sometimes it’s necessary.”

Dean shock is plain. Tears spill from his eyes. “You—Cas, don’t you remember what you did?”

It prickles, faint and itchy at the back of his mind.

The sensation fades.

“I do remember,” he says at last. Perhaps Dean’s soul was damaged on its final journey. It has taken more beatings than any human soul should. He recalls empathy, and draws on it. He does not want to harm his friend. “But not the way you do.”

Dean steps away from him. Backs away, as though he can’t stand to be in Castiel’s space any longer. His hands rise and fall once. He is crying without shame now, his face wet with it.

“I am sorry, Dean.” Though he doesn’t entirely know for what.

There is nothing he can do here, only more harm if he stays. So he leaves.

He feels bereft after, and he can’t explain why.

*

Now that he has seen Dean, though, been in his presence—a fiercely bright soul riddled with scars but infinitely stronger in all the places where it has mended—he can’t remove from himself the disquiet. Strange. He has not wanted for anything since Jack brought him here, returned to him his wings and gifted him powers he had not thought to ever possess. Not even the archangels had housed this thrum within their grace, this sometimes savage, sometimes soporific vibration beneath the surface. Castiel thinks he may be something entirely new, a singularity in Jack’s smiling eyes.

It makes creation a thing of ease. 

It also makes stunting his own awareness very difficult. He can’t help but turn his sight to the man he left in the field in front of that modest house.

For a day—a day in the realm of mortality—Dean does nothing. He sits on his porch, through the sunset and into the dark, hand cupped over his left shoulder, and he does… nothing. He stares out over the lake, but Castiel can tell he isn’t seeing it. He is lost, locked in memory, as the souls in Heaven That Was used to be. It is disconcerting to see him so still, not favoring the whims of the body he has chosen to wear here.

Dean Winchester _is_ the righteous man. He is movement, and action. He is love and regret and profound loyalty, not this.

The sun rises, and Dean sits, not seeing the lake. Midway through the second day, he pushes to his feet without warning, walks to the garage, and gets into the car. He drives, sleek black along the road, until he comes to a sprawling house abutting a wall of trees, with wild roses in great bunches along one side. He gets out, walks up the porch steps, and knocks.

The door opens to frame his mother. 

“Dean.” Mary Winchester’s smile drops when she sees his face. She gestures him in, but Dean backs up instead, and she comes out, leads him back to the steps where they both sit down, their jean clad knees bumping.

“Dean, what’s… Are you alright?” 

“I saw him,” Dean says. “Finally.”

It’s a conversation begun in the middle, with a past that Castiel did not overhear. Joy behind it for both of them, and wonder, now fading. 

“That’s good.” Mary’s hands twitch like her words, hovering around hope; she wants to touch him, but won’t. “Right?”

“He… He said.”

“What did he say?” she prompts after a moment.

“Mom,” Dean chokes, and crumples into her arms.

She makes a noise, and grabs him up and rocks him.

*

He’d always thought, once Jack took control, that the pieces would just click together, finally settling into place. But he doesn’t feel at rest in this Heaven. He never really felt at rest in the last one, he recalls, a fact he hadn’t recognized until he’d spent time on earth, with… with…

“The humans,” he mutters. But that’s not right. Too wide a net. Not specific enough.

He’d only recognized his restlessness in Heaven as soon as he’d found a home.

Castiel blinks once. Twice.

Home. Home was… walls, sometimes, and ceilings. Churning tires down gravel roads. Glass windows and a comfortable seat. A door to close out the world. Home was such satisfied peace, home was never, _ever_ wanting to leave, even when he had to, because everything he truly needed was right there.

He shuts his eyes, and for a second, he sees it: a warm and breathing silence, the voices in his head stilled. Soft, familiar scents. A waiting word, the sure grip of a hand on his shoulder, and a color very nearly peridot.

And then it’s gone. 

*

~tbc~


	2. Chapter 2

_Cas._

_Cas, please come back. I don't... don't know how to find you here._

_Please._

Not responding does not sit right. But Castiel cannot currently see a way to answer this prayer without causing more harm.

*

He seeks company outside of humankind and feels relief, a settling of roiled waters.

Well, relatively speaking.

“Bravo, brother. May I just say, you are a sight to behold these days.”

Balthazar walks behind Castiel as they move through the as-yet-unwoven space of Heaven, as Castiel strings filament and atom into long, lush chains of inert matter, matter which Balthazar then crouches beside to touch, to coax into blooming life: spirals and dodecahedrons multiplying infinitely into pinpricks, into buds, into twisting, towering landscapes ready for the eternal inhabitation of souls. The sounds of grinding and cracking, creaking and groaning, wood straining behind him as it stretches skyward, Castiel reaches again into the pool of possibility and pulls from it: breath. 

Balthazar makes a sound very close to awe, but baser, guttural in that human sort of way. “Alright, what exactly did he _do_ to you? Tell me he explained it, I am dying to know.”

“He remade me.”

A snort behind him. “Hm. That’s very descriptive, Castiel, thank—Hold on, are you _literally_ creating from nothing?”

Castiel allows a smile. Of all the angels Jack took back from the Empty, his brother here is a favorite, and the one he has missed most, since he knew what it was to miss. Balthazar reminds him so much of Earth, of static existence and crawling days, and yet also of clout and immensity, of unquenchable mortal tenacity, of the otherness of walking between worlds. “Of course not. Only Jack can do that. I just see things I was unable to see before.”

“I imagine he needed the help, what with how quickly this all went up.”

Castiel hums. “There was a lot to do.” The words strike an echo of those spoken before in a field by a lake, and of crinkled, smiling green eyes. He frowns and pushes it away. “I wanted to help.”

“This was all you?”

“This section, yes.”

Balthazar rubs his hands and looks around, appreciative. “Well, it’s lovely. But you certainly are burning the candle at both ends.”

“Meaning?”

The laugh is brief; he claps Castiel on the back. Castiel thinks they have both grown far too used to human appendages. “You’re still awfully hard at work, considering.”

Sometimes speaking to this brother in particular is an exercise in the saintliest of patience. “Considering...”

“Considering that _he’s_ here now.” Balthazar smirks, waving a hand at the great general nothing before them and the rolling wilderness behind. “I thank my stars I’ve had you for as long as I have. I figured once this happened, I’d see neither pinion nor plumage of you ever again.”

Castiel thinks. “Are you speaking of Dean Winchester?”

“Who else?” 

“I have seen him.”

“Oh, just the once?” Balthazar snorts.

“Yes.”

He walks on, not realizing Balthazar has stopped until his brother speaks again.

“Sorry, Castiel, I... don’t follow.”

Castiel sighs, turning to face him. “What I did to you. It was wrong.”

Balthazar looks stymied by the change in topic, but he rallies and comes closer. “You’re forgiven, brother.” His words come slowly, deliberately. His eyes never leave Castiel’s, though it’s not a direct look, more a sideways one. “There is a lot that one can see when… when rid of and then reintroduced to this immortal coil. I may not like your actions, but I understand why, at the time, you felt them necessary. And I’ve seen what has happened since.” His brow creases, then clears, the sun lighting his face again. “Ah. Is this about guilt, then? Why you’ve not gone to him.”

“Gone to him?”

“To Winchester. To Dean.” Balthazar makes a motion as though to shove him along. “Believe me, Castiel, he knows a lot more than he used to as well. Coming here does that to a person. Whatever you think he begrudges you, I assure you, he does not.”

“That is well, then. His time here will be best spent without remorse.”

There is an awkward silence while Castiel returns to his work.

“But...” His brother looks, for once, at a loss for words. “Castiel.”

“Yes.”

“Aren’t you glad to have him here?”

Castiel lifts his shoulders. Drops them. The motion is entirely too familiar, and not angelic in the slightest. “He was my friend. I—”

_“Was?”_

“—am pleased he is in Heaven.”

Balthazar stares at him now as though he doesn’t quite recognize him. “You’re pleased.”

“Yes.”

“Pleased.”

“Did I not just—”

Balthazar silences him with a chop of his hands. “Yes, why are you not overjoyed? Swooning? Beside yourself? You have him now, forever! Don’t tell me you didn’t want that.”

Castiel frowns. “I don’t.”

Balthazar gapes. Castiel sighs again, then comes forward and places his hand on his brother’s arm. “I am glad he is in Heaven. For what he’s done, he deserves no less. Why would I have need of, or a desire for, forever?”

Balthazar shakes his head. He looks utterly bewildered. “You fell from grace for him.”

“And I regret that I did that.”

“No.” Balthazar steps out of his hold, his expression gone firm, distrustful. “No, you would not regret that. Even then, I could see it, despite all your little side projects. And now—” His eyes narrow. “What’s happened to you?”

“Nothing has happened to me—”

“No, you’re _different._ Something’s been off about you this entire time. I put it down to what was done to you by our family, the years we’ve been apart. The loss of your grace, mortality, I don’t know! I’ve brushed it off, but this… This is not right. I don’t know if His Holiness put things back together wrong—”

“This is nothing to do with Jack!”

“Ha!” Balthazar pokes his chest, stepping back. “‘This.’ I knew it. You feel it, too.”

“I…” He does, is the thing. He no longer fits right in his skin, and why… why is he in skin, anyway? He is a celestial being. He has no need of this form anymore. And yet, he has taken it, the shape of James Novak, and worn it the entire time since he stepped free of the Empty and into Jack’s embrace. 

_His_ Jack. His son.

The assault is completely unexpected, wrenching at the ground beneath his feet. Jack. Jack is… To him, Jack means…

Balthazar reaches for him, opening his mouth, but Castiel cannot stand the thought of being touched, not like this, not when he has suddenly fractured and can’t locate all his pieces. He leaves, again.

*

He means to leave it behind, too, but it follows him; doors previously locked now stand ajar, dark slivers the only hint of the rooms beyond.

He abandons the rim of Heaven. He returns to the lake.

Dean is sitting on the sand this time, in the shadow of the dock, his arms braced atop bent knees. His bare toes only just touch the water as it laps in. A fishing pole rests at his side, but there is no bait, no tackle. Just Dean. 

Castiel’s feet crunch and clack over small stones. It’s only a matter of time before Dean lifts his head. He’s in jeans, rolled untidily to his knees and slipping back down his calves, the denim at the bottom soaked with water. His shirt is thick flannel in red and black. He holds himself tightly, the line of his shoulders bound in invisible wire. “You’re back.”

“Yes,” Castiel says cautiously. His welcome, it seems, is far from assured.

Dean looks up at him, and for an instant, the welcome is not only plain but feverish. Hope in a drowning man’s face. His eyes search Castiel’s face and form, digging, lingering. Eventually the light in them dims; Dean turns away, folding further into himself. Castiel feels inexplicably closed off.

“I get it now, at least.” Dean tosses a stone into the water, where it disappears with a _sloop._ “How you felt when I said all that shit to you.”

Castiel is unsure what he is meant to say. In the quiet, Dean swallows. “Brotherhood. Family. It sounds so empty when you know there’s more. But it was still all true, Cas. You are family. You’re _my_ family.” His voice turns briefly fierce, then subsides. “It was all true.”

What sort of answer is there to this sort of grief? What is Castiel hoping to accomplish here? Yet something stirs inside, begs him to stay. To listen. 

He looks at Dean, then looks again, and the taste on the back of his tongue sours. Dean’s soul, so bright and livid in their last meeting, is muted now, frayed around the edges. Castiel’s insides rebel against the bent look of it, and the urge to take hold of him, cradle him as he had that very first moment in Hell and chafe him to life again, is potent.

It hurts to look at him like this, faded and listless, when Castiel knows what he really is.

“When I saw you,” Dean says suddenly. “First day you came here. Man, all that time, all those talks with my mom and Charlie and with, with Sam, and I thought I knew. But then you showed up. I _saw_ you. And that’s when I was sure. That’s how I knew I was right about the way I felt. A hundred, a _thousand_ percent. It all just clicked home. It’s like this place finally became...” His gaze moves sightlessly across the water and he squeezes at the air with both hands. “What it was supposed to be.”

Castiel frowns down at the top of Dean’s head. Dean’s reaction to his distance is understandable now, if still frustratingly remote. But one part rings loud: _What this place is supposed to be._

He’d thought he had known. He has helped make this heaven; surely he comprehends the reasons for Jack’s changes. But try as he might, he can’t recall any true immersion in the ideal, even as he spun realities from his fingers. He doesn’t remember infusing that meaning into the matter as he knows he should have done. Heaven That Was, as flawed as it was, was made with love, or as close as the angels could come to such an emotion: an intention for goodness, comfort, and pleasure. 

His head feels like a far off but dense fog; beyond its edge are the answers he seeks, but he can’t see through the gloom.

He wonders wearily if he’s really tried.

“What have you said to the others? To Balthazar.”

Dean squints up at him, shading his eyes. _Balthazar?_ his mouth shapes noiselessly. There’s no knowledge attached, only confusion. “I thought he was…” Dean stops, purses his lips. “I talked to my mom. No one else, except you, Cas.”

 _Cas._ Castiel responds to it without thought, has since Dean first winged it his way on a prayer. It hadn’t even surprised him. _Cas._ He thinks about that.

“You saved us all,” he says, and Dean looks up again. “You and your brother stood against our father and won.” 

Dean’s expression is wry. “We didn’t do it alone.” When Castiel frowns, Dean sighs, fiddling with the fishing pole where it lies next to him. “I wouldn’t even have been there _to_ win if not for you.”

Castiel nods, relieved at the sight of familiar ground. “I am glad you survived. And that I had a hand in that.”

Dean makes a choked, incredulous sort of sound, and when Castiel searches his face, he finds it as haunted as that first day when nothing Castiel said turned out right.

“You didn’t just have a hand in it,” Dean grits out. He’s gripping the fishing pole in his hands now, clasping and releasing. “You gave yourself up so that I’d survive.”

He...had. Hadn’t he? Castiel squints. A bunker. Pounding. Failure imminent. The whole thing feels like looking through a dirtied glass pane at something that happened to someone else.

When he prods at the memories, they come away damp and sticky, clinging to the places where they have come to rest and refusing to hold their shape. They are thready, wistful, and most of all, bleak. He doesn’t like looking at them, doesn’t enjoy the feelings they conjure. Alone, on an Earth devoid of his kind. Not quite of Heaven and not quite of the Winchesters. Part of, bound to, but also aloof.

Ill-fitting. There’s that term again, popping into his head. He examines it, and it chimes crystal clear in a sea of echoes.

And Dean is glaring at him. “Why are you wearing him, then?”

It’s an obscene question. “Dean.”

“No, Cas, _why?_ Why this shape, this face? You could be anything here.”

They are his own thoughts, come back to stalk him in another’s voice.

“Because it is familiar,” he says at last. Dean huffs out a breath and looks away.

But Cas is caught up for a moment: Not familiar to him. It’s familiar to Dean. This form is the one that Dean knew. “I suppose I’m used to it.”

“Yeah, so am I.” Dean doesn’t look at him, though. Dean is shaking his head, his face set in grim lines.

“I do remember you, Dean,” Castiel says after a long moment. He’s beyond analyzing this need to explain; he just knows that he does need to, something about this man drives him toward it. He has the strangest sense of having been here before, and of Dean refusing to listen. And—of course he’s been there before, he has clear memories of it. 

Except they aren’t clear, exactly. He recalls the texture of this sort of interaction, the stubborn wall on Dean’s side and the crumbling one on his. But why is his side crumbling, and why is Dean’s mulishness so very difficult to swallow? 

He shakes his head. “I remember our friendship. Our bond.”

Dean tilts his head. “Jeez, even the way you say it.”

“What, our bond?” Castiel can’t hold the irritation, though; he’s caught in the way Dean’s eyelashes dip, and the glitter on them. In this place, this man should be nothing but pinpricks and prisms of light, and yet Castiel sees every human detail of him. It’s comforting deep inside, as though the sight has been woven into him.

Dean wipes his face. He goes back to the pole, then lets it drop and grips the rolled hems of his jeans instead, squeezing excess water free. “You remember that? Gripping me tight? Raising me from perdition?” 

His tone cuts, and Castiel reels a little. “I remember everything, Dean.”

“Don’t your memories feel off?” Today, it is not Dean’s grief but his anger that resonates. Castiel remembers it from when they were amongst the living, a wretched, ferocious thing with its roots dug too deeply into a hundred old wounds. 

He also remembers Dean apologizing for it, frantic to find him in an endless forest as time slid away, and stopping all the same, taking the time to speak. 

It comes over Castiel slowly: the planes of Dean’s soul are as sharp and solid as the planes of his face, the set of his jaw, the flint in his eye. The peculiar green there seethes, nearly alive, and his entire being vibrates with it, a total commitment to the emotion. Even angry, Dean is arresting.

 _Especially angry,_ Castiel thinks, and then stares at himself.

But there is something adding subtly to Dean’s resonance, and it’s not the anger at all, but the near-silent riptide beneath it. An utter lack of caution. Dean, desperate, at the end of his rope and throwing himself over the edge.

It’s harrowing to witness, and not as unfamiliar as it should be.

“Perhaps the memories don’t feel the same as they did on Earth,” Castiel says, trying it on for size. “There are adjustments to be made, in this state of being. As your form evolves. As you understand more. Things look different.” 

Dean is gripping handfuls of sand and pebbles now. His knuckles are pale, he’s squeezing so hard. 

“One thing I am sure of,” Castiel says, frustrated and trying to find some way out of Dean’s pain, for both of them. “I was never disloyal to you. Not willingly.” It’s the truth, even skirting the disconcerting blind spots he keeps finding. He has done many, many things he is not proud of, things that tore apart his grace and that he should perhaps still pay for, but he knows where his fidelity lay when he was with the Winchesters. Logically, there is no reason this should cut Dean so deeply. “I did things to myself that made loyalty difficult. A lot of things. And they… taxed my resolve, my control. I was foolish. I reached too far. But the leviathan, the souls I stole—” There are a great many holes here, more than anywhere else. “They never broke my allegiance to you. Even Naomi couldn’t—”

“Naomi,” Dean breaks in, pointing a finger at Castiel. Castiel feels suddenly like prey. “That’s good, let’s talk about that.”

Castiel looks away. “I would rather not.”

Dean’s hand rises, drifting into Castiel’s space, then retreats. But his voice is hard. “I need you to.”

“If you’re going to judge me for the actions she perpetrated through my hands—”

“You _killed_ me. Thousands of times, Cas! Don’t you care about why she made you do that?”

Why _had_ it mattered to Naomi that he slaughter this human, over and over? His brother Sam would have been just as fruitful a fly to make Castiel swat: both were his friends, his charges. His responsibility.

And yet... Dean. 

He remembers blood on his sword, blood on his hands. Facsimile blood, then real blood. And then—then—

_I need you._

_I need you._

He shakes his head, tries to shake himself free of the image. The words. They stick, though. They cling.

Logically—But the holes are everywhere now, black spaces gnawing at his memory. He is acutely aware of Dean breathing beside him, the rise and fall of his back, the way his chest expands, the heat exuding from the body he wears, the way the clothing drapes around him and the way his hands will not stop moving. First the rocks, then the pole, then his jeans and the sand, now the clench of them atop his knees, trying so unsuccessfully to _be still._

Castiel watches the way they tremble. “Are you—?”

“Do you know how hard it is not to just touch you right now?” Dean rushes out, then wipes his eyes with both palms.

Castiel stands and backs away. With each step, Dean’s frame curls indefinably smaller.

“Cas?” Dean says when Castiel is almost off the beach. He remains facing the lake, but his entire soul is attuned in Castiel’s direction. “Cas, don’t, I can’t help you if I can’t find you.” 

The distress splintering Dean’s voice is an old, oft-opened wound in Castiel’s insides.

“Don’t leave.”

He has to. He…

The holes gape like mouths.

He has to.

*

He goes back to the edge and sits in the darkness just beyond the light, and he reaches into those holes and tries to find something on which to _pull._

There is nothing that doesn’t slip through his grip, eeling away into the black. But for an instant, he touches something. It’s always the same thing, a brush against his fingers, an incredible warmth, a lift in his chest like wings unfurling—

Gone.

He strains and scrapes and howls in rage as his every effort is thwarted, until he is a shaking, miserable mess of a celestial being on the cold edge of Heaven. He is glad of the dark to hide him.

When he has calmed again, his thoughts continue to circle. He has seen Dean’s entire soul—in Hell, in Heaven, many times on earth—he has been aware of this, he has known it—but only now when he stops and makes himself think, only now does its rarity, its exceptional brilliance, strike him. Its layers and depths. Its darkened corners. Its light. 

He held that soul, he thinks distantly. He held it in his hands.

Dean is love, and regret, and profound loyalty. How is it that he knows Dean’s entire being is fashioned of love, and yet cannot remember why? Or how he came to that conclusion? Or why he knows it as a bedrock truth?

How is it that, without Dean, he feels like an imposter, watching a cardboard version of himself walk his steps and speak his words, and mean none of what he is meant to feel?

*

The next prayer he hears is to Jack.

Castiel scowls. He is frighteningly in tune with Dean Winchester. Never before has he heard a human’s prayer that was not directly to him. That alone would have been enough to perk his ears. Coming late, as it has, it acts as yet another boulder painstakingly pulled away from the collapse around him.

 _Jack?_ It wisps in and out, a voice being blown by the wind. _Jack, I know you’re hands off—respect it, you know I d—od knows, or you know, I guess, that half the trouble we were in—cause Chuck couldn’t kee—hands to himself._

This at least tallies with what Castiel remembers. But there are so many gaps in it, now that he looks it in the face. The vague, fuzzed over spaces feel like hinges upon which the next door swings. Actions he took and choices he made that he can’t even explain to himself.

A veil hangs between him and whatever was plucked from those holes, and he can’t tear through it.

 _But._ Dean pauses. _Jack, this is about Cas._

The nickname feels like an old coat now, worn loose and comfortable. He stretches helplessly after the fleeting feeling as it dissipates with all the rest.

 _—atever it takes—would go back to Hell for him, in a heartbea—_

Yes. Dean did go to Hell. Dean was in Hell. That’s where Castiel found him, where he saw him, all of him, for the first time, and once he took hold, he never quite let go. He knows it. So why can’t he _see_ it?

 _—mething’s wrong._ There are so many cracks in Dean’s voice. _Something’s just… missi—e’s not right. —ack, please, just, plea—f you can hear me. He, he doesn’t remember._

And then an image. No, a sequence, a moment sliced from time in the darkness of a basement Castiel knows.

And Castiel stares, eyes wide, transfixed by a tragedy, watching himself speak words he cannot recall ever even thinking. Even as he hears them, even as they pound fissures through his heart, they evaporate from memory. 

But it’s his voice. It’s _his_ wound and _his_ pain, it’s part of that thing trapped in the black, it belongs to him, he can feel it, and something has torn it away.

He gasps, keeling over as the scene plays again and again, as his voice repeats, as the words themselves mist away, as Dean breaks in front of him, again, again, _again._ As he, Castiel, dies. The memory through Dean’s eyes is pink and sore, jagged like a broken bone. It gouges deeper with each replay, not into him but into Dean, and Castiel feels it like his own body is being cut. 

“Stop,” he tries, “please stop, _Dean,”_ but it doesn’t. It doesn’t.

He forgets that he doesn’t need to breathe and ends up wheezing into the sparking void as it devours his vision. 

He loses time. 

Eventually the ringing fades out. Eventually the void clears, and he can see again. He straightens into blessed quiet, alone in the field outside Dean’s house. It’s dark, full night. Crickets sing in the long grass. He doesn’t remember coming here, but Dean’s voice is loud and clear now, mere yards away on the other side of a solid wooden wall where lamplight shines through the window. 

_If there’s anything I can do or, or give,_ Dean is saying—pleading— _then you tell me and it’s yours. Anything, Jack._

*

~tbc~


	3. Chapter 3

Maybe Jack would have found him. Castiel does not wait.

Heaven feels uneasy. Nothing the human souls would be aware of, but a waiting sort of tension all the same; Jack looks troubled, a furrow in his brow that deepens as Castiel nears. He still wears the clothing of Earth: white denim, blue shirt, loose jeans. He looks both old and young, invincible and fragile, and he watches Castiel’s approach as though he’s seeing the end of the world behind him.

“Balthazar is worried,” Jack says. “So are Mary, and Dean.” _I’m worried, too_ goes unsaid.

“I don’t feel right.” What Castiel feels is his control chipping around the edges. All he can hear is Dean’s voice, all he can see is Dean’s light dimming, going darker and darker as time drags on, leaving nothing but the sense that it is _his fault._ His doing, or not doing, as it were. Something he cannot get at, just beyond his fingertips, but the evidence of it is all around him, the blank spaces obvious.

Jack’s frown darkens. “May I?”

In Castiel’s state of turmoil, it feels like a reprimand. There is something about Jack himself that is beautiful but bittersweet, a memory of wonder that also drips betrayal, that makes some small part of Castiel feel endlessly sick. A harsh and costly sacrifice he can’t remember making. Another door that refuses to open for him. But Castiel stands still as Jack’s hands rise to cradle his face, and as soon as they touch, calm ripples through him, a stone tossed into his center to cleanse as its impact reverberates outward.

It only lasts for a moment, though; following in its wake is a diffuse and nauseating tug. It’s as though all the holes in Castiel’s memories pull back and snap to at once. He sways in the shock of it. Bones he doesn’t have grind together.

He sees Dean sprawled before him, bloody fingerprints dark on the shoulder of his jacket, every inch of him begging—he feels arms around him, fierce and hot against pressing shadows—he smells leather and oil and pain—

Gone.

He becomes aware, again, of Jack’s hands on his face. Of Heaven all around him.

“I missed it.” Jack looks dazed. His eyes are far away, searching through space-time. Just as quickly, they flick back to Castiel. “When I pulled you out—How did I miss this?”

Like drawing a breath, Castiel understands: the ache in Jack’s being is not for him, but for Jack himself. He perceives himself as having failed. Even with all he has done, all those he has saved, Jack can only see his mistakes, and those mistakes cut him. Castiel lays his hand over Jack’s where it still touches his face, and Jack’s fingers tremble.

“It’s alright.” Castiel’s own words are a surprise, but no more so than their tone, their affectionate, open tenderness. He feels for this… this boy, who is a god but who is also his, somehow. The greatest gift he ever received. “What has happened to me?”

“It took something from you.” Jack remains stricken by whatever he has seen. He shakes his head as though drugged. His hands slide down Castiel’s cheeks, then fall to his sides. “I brought you out, and the Entity gave you up, but…” 

_Something_ pops free in his mind, a clean click. “But not all of me.”

All the light pours out of Heaven, and the chill churns through Castiel like a tunnel of wind. Jack’s eyes burn yellow, then flare so brightly they are nearly white. His shadow, so simple behind him on the grass, grows larger, blotting out trees, mountains, sky. His fists squeeze until his knuckles are bloodless and the entirety of Heaven vibrates around them. 

He is _angry._ Furious. Castiel’s insides twist into knots. The heat Jack gives off batters, but it is not aimed at him.

As suddenly as it began, it is over: Jack shuts his eyes and draws a deep breath. The air cools. Heaven is just as it always had been: slumbering. Peaceful. 

When Jack looks at Castiel again, he is calm. He grips Castiel by the arms. “I didn’t know,” he says, nearly a whisper. “Cas, I didn’t… I’m sorry. I should have looked closer.”

“Look now,” Cas says, and squares himself before his god. 

“I can see what it has done.” Jack sighs and, looking like it’s the last thing he wants to do, releases Castiel. “But I can’t reach it. It’s too deep, behind a barrier I can’t break.”

“But it’s there.” Castiel grabs hold of this, a spark feeble in his chest.

Jack nods. “Yes.”

“Please.” Castiel seizes his arm, a liberty he never would have dared if not for the panic inside. “Please try.”

Jack slides his hands around Castiel’s elbows, cradling both arms. He lowers his head. His eyes spark bright, and Castiel feels pushed, gently, then firmly, then nearly out of himself and into the ether.

He comes back gasping, leaning into Jack, who holds him up. His blue eyes are full of tears.

“I can’t. Castiel, I’m sorry. I can’t reach it without harming you.”

Castiel stares down at the grass, waving and green, and swallows.

“You never told me how you felt about him,” Jack says softly. “Not in words.”

Castiel wants to laugh, until he cries. “And now I’ll never know.”

“No.” Jack’s tone brooks no argument. He releases Castiel again and steps away. His shadow still weights the air between them. “No, you will find what the Entity hides from you.”

“How?”

Jack’s face scrunches and he looks like the child Castiel remembers, a barely born soul smitten with the world. “It’s like... a rubber band, what it did. Stretched tight and ready to snap back, except the door is shut. So all it does is keep on stretching. I can open the door again for you, but I can’t go in.” 

Castiel shudders. The last place he wants to go is back to the Empty. “And when _I_ go in?”

“Find the Entity. It senses the stretch too. It’s uncomfortable for it. Soon it will be unbearable.”

He nods, but feels despair. Unbearable or not, he will never convince the Entity to undo what it has done, and if Jack cannot break these walls, what hope does Castiel have? “I _need_ it back.” His innards are raw with the knowledge.

“I know.” Jack smiles, and again looks like the boy he was. “Don’t worry.”

*

The Empty was a place that filled one with nothing, as though nothing could pour in like water and drown all substance, all personality, all thought.

Castiel flinches as it presses persistently against his being, searching for the tiniest of cracks to be let back inside.

There is no light, and no remembrance of light, here. He still understands the concept, but the true sense of it, the warmth of it on his face, is just an idea. He grasps onto this idea, holds it in the center of himself as far away from the nothing as it can get.

 _You will go,_ Jack said, _and free what is yours._

Coming here changes everything, but especially, it amplifies the relentless fist around his memories. The missing parts are so obvious, becoming one with the emptiness around him. Though he can’t see it, he feels the strain of this thing tethered between himself and the Entity. The pull is too tight, the burn of stretched thought too strong. It will break, inevitably, and until it does, both Castiel and the Entity will feel it.

How many of his siblings had this thing also twisted up, stolen from, carved apart before Jack brought them out? He grips this anger, too, another savage spark in the void, and anchors himself around it.

“Where are you?” he demands. The thing here hates noise just a little more than it hates him.

For a moment, only silence.

“You,” hisses a voice, and yes, there is indeed a rage colder than ice.

But Castiel is finished feeling broken. “Show yourself!”

It comes with a slither, up from the void beneath his feet: liquid and sinuous, tarry as oblivion. Castiel senses its proximity, though he cannot pinpoint where all parts of it are, and the knowledge sends an oily convulsion through him.

A face appears out of the gloom, rooted in fluidic threads, and it is not his face, nor Meg’s, nor Duma’s, nor any face he expects. 

It’s Dean’s face, and it smiles at him.

“Give it back,” Castiel snarls, sick to his core.

The Entity laughs, and it has nothing on Dean. The features, though molecularly perfect, are devoid of the elements that bring Dean to life. The crinkles surrounding its smile are flat, manufactured, and the eyes are dim, mere mirrors in a counterfeit green that reminds Castiel of rot. There is no profundity, and certainly there is no blazing soul. “Give what back, exactly?”

“My memories.” _Him. Give him back to me._

“And what will you give me in return?”

“Nothing,” Castiel sneers into its face. The longer he looks at it, the less it reminds him of Dean and the more it yanks at all the things missing from his mind. The sensation is torture. “You aren’t able to hold onto it.”

“Of course I am.”

“No.” Castiel shakes his head. He circles the Entity, and it turns to watch him. “You hid it, and you shoved me free. You have no power to take memories, only to awaken them or to push them under. That’s the only way you have kept it down as long as you have, because you thrust me out.”

Dean’s face twists, obstinate. “You don’t even know what you’ve lost.”

“I do,” he shouts, just to watch it wince. He touches his chest. “I feel it, every time I look at him! I know that something is gone, that you did this. Every moment it remains hidden, I feel it.”

It repeats slowly, smugly: “And you don’t even know what you’ve lost.”

He nods in a defeat he doesn’t want to acknowledge. “But I do know how to get it back,” he says, and steps closer. “All we need is to touch.” Which is why it hasn’t come close enough, yet.

It scoffs. “Who told you that? Your new god?”

“Yes. The one who took us all away from you.”

It looks utterly venomous now. But it doesn’t move. Castiel extends a hand between them.

The Entity eyes him warily. “I’m flattered, but—”

“Give me your hand.”

“What does it matter?” It sounds bored, finished with this new stimulus. “It’s already breaking through, you’ll have, well, most of it eventually, in a century or two—”

 _“Give me your hand,”_ he demands, punctuating each word, his throat a messy stricture.

The Entity sighs, mocks up an arm to go with the face, and places the hand into his.

Castiel rocks backward.

_I love you. I love all of you—_

_—a more profound bond—_

_—needs every last Winchester it can get, and I will not let you die—_

_—the one who gripped you tight—_

_—except me. I’m the only one who will have to watch you—_

_—cared about the whole world, because of you—_

_—nothing but pain here. I see inside you—_

_—I think I know… I think I know now—_

_—did it, all of it, for you—_

_—when I experienced a moment of true happiness—_

_—in just being. It’s in just saying it._

_I love—_

_“Dean.”_ It’s the worst sound he’s ever made. Time crawls to a stop and he staggers under its weight.

Dean, a thousand holes filled at once, with him.

How long might Castiel have gone on, had he not gone to Dean in Heaven that day? Years? Decades? A millennium without remembering, while all Dean did was remember?

His Dean. What has he done?

His fury is incandescent. His sight clouds a thick, pulpy red, the red of heart’s blood, of the blood that he—that he has cleaned from the body of the man he—the man he—His sword manifests, as long as his torso and keen as diamond. He lunges for the Entity, and it flits away.

“Now, now,” it says.

“You have caused so much _pain.”_ It growls out of him, rabid, and yet it’s wounded and bleeding itself, curled in a corner and unable to get up. Dean. His Dean. “You hurt _him,_ you hurt both of us, all of us, you—”

“Mm.”

“Why?” he cries, shaken in a way he hasn’t been since—since—He has to get to Dean, oh, Father of fathers, how had he looked Dean in the eye and uttered those things, how had he not shattered with the falsity of it? How had lightning not struck him dead for his lies, how had he stood there and stabbed his love again and again with such flimsy blades of praise?

 _Brothers in arms._ He feels ill.

“Because I wanted to _break_ you,” the Entity seethes, sudden and alive in the blackness. “Because even dead, you refused to bow. You were happy. Even in death, you were at peace. You made me sick, and you _would not break.”_

He feels the gentlest of tugs then, Jack’s fingers slipping around his soul and over his wings, and there is nothing missing about Jack anymore, nothing damming this flood of devotion, and it is consuming. Now he knows why looking at Jack is bittersweet, because as great as the gift of his son was, as incomparable and as precious, it had cost him Dean to get it, twice. Castiel’s love for Jack is, was, always will be so tied up in his love for Dean. Of course the Entity had to hide pieces of Jack too; it could not pick the threads fully apart. They wind together and make Castiel whole. 

His throat is aflame, the bile of these injuries eating him up in licks and burbles, and he hurts. He thinks of Dean on the edge of the lake, and he hurts so badly. 

“If I ever encounter you again,” he manages, “I will kill you.”

“You don’t have the power.”

He unfurls all of his wings with a mighty crack, a smash of light into the darkness. The whole place goes up in a dizzying corona, his wings filling the space, slashing through the nothing like razors, a million years, a thousand nights of rage since he’d left Dean’s side, rage he had not even known to feel, colors that cannot be seen by mortal eye. Around them, dozens of voices wake into plaintive cries, and the Entity cringes back, shielding its face with every limb.

“I will find it,” Cas promises, flaring brighter, brighter, _brighter._ He knows it to be the truth, just as now he knows his own heart again. _Dean,_ says his heart, _Dean,_ and _Dean,_ and _Dean._ The noise is cacophonous, more souls stirring to awareness with every scream. 

In an instant, he is on the Entity, so close he can taste its cold, empty core. It tries to flee, but he reaches in, grabs onto that core, and closes his fist. “I will _end_ you.”

For the first time ever, the Entity really looks at him. No longer angry, and no longer laughing. A shadow lurks in its borrowed face.

“You are not what you were,” it whispers, shying away from the whetted vanes of his wings, from the searing sword. Even the chaos cannot smother its words.

“No. I am not.”

And then Jack takes hold. Plucks him away.

*

The lake is restless today. Wind scuds across its surface, lifting the waves into small whitecaps. The trees on the far side bend and creak together, and Castiel stands at the edge of the field, helpless to move any further.

He can’t help but watch Dean as he walks from his front porch down toward the dock, then back again. Down. Back. Down. He wears a jacket Castiel knows well today, rich brown leather with the collar high and his hands shoved deep into the pockets. His shoulders rise against the unseasonable chill, but the sun glints in his hair: gold and jasper, the barest flick of silver.

He’s been alone since Castiel last left. Hasn’t gone to his brother or his parents, any of his friends. Hasn’t asked them to come to him. Only Dean’s soul has touched this place. Castiel’s whole being clenches, part injury and part shame, but he’s too far away to feel anything that Dean is radiating and too afraid to reach until he can sense it. 

But there is enough without that. There is the look in Dean’s eye as he’d turned back to Castiel in the bunker, the Empty coming through the wall and Death through the door. There is the instant Castiel saw that Dean understood what he was about to say and do. There is the curled form of him on the floor where Castiel pushed him, where his eyes held nothing but disbelief that this was happening.

Dean, standing tall at the lake’s edge, looks somehow even smaller than he had that day. The inherent motion in him is disturbingly still. Poised on the rim, waiting. Castiel did that, with his callous words, his unthinking actions. His saints-damned unwillingness to see what was right in front of him.

He stares at Dean now, eyes blurring with his grief, and doesn’t know how he ever saw differently.

This is his failure, again. There is no skin here to guard what’s within, no mortal flesh to weather the blow. This is the way he truly harms the one soul he swore never to injure.

He moves, one shaky step forward.

“Dean.” His voice breaks, but it carries: Dean looks up.

For a moment, nothing moves. Then Castiel does, another faltering step, and Dean turns toward him, jogs up the slight incline away from the water. He’s staring at Castiel like he’s seen a ghost, and his face is just… the twisting there… 

Somehow Castiel makes it across the grass toward the sandy beach, where he halts, swaying, Dean mere feet away. Dean’s eyes ravage his face, and Castiel lets himself be searched, throws all the doors wide. He has nothing, nothing else to lose anymore. 

“Cas?” Dean’s voice is thready.

Castiel had words ready, but now he can’t speak any of them. If he tries, he’ll burst apart, all his faults and regrets spilling free in whatever order they come.

But Dean steps forward instead and pulls Castiel into his arms.

The sob tears at Castiel’s throat. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, I’m...”

Dean murmurs into his hair. It just makes the ache burst open anyway, spattering all over Castiel’s innards. “I love you,” Castiel says, new words tripping over themselves to get out, “I have always, always loved you, I don’t think I can do otherwise anymore, and I _never_ stopped, no matter what, I swear to you—”

“Not your fault.” Dean is firm and warm, and the sense of him expands in Castiel’s chest in a ray of sunlight.

Castiel squeezes his eyes shut and thumps his fist helplessly against Dean’s back. “I should have tried _harder.”_

“Cas, if I could have gone down there, I’d have killed it for you.”

Castiel wants to blame the Entity. But every time he imagined himself saying such a thing, it felt like an excuse, a shunting aside of the real fault: that _he_ hadn’t believed hard enough, that _he_ had lost his faith. But Dean already knows. He knows. Castiel, remade Angel of the Lord, cries into Dean’s shoulder in a torrent of hurt, of relief.

“You know I would,” Dean whispers against the side of his head.

He smells... Dean smells... Castiel inhales greedily, pushing his nose into the arc of skin where Dean’s shoulder meets his throat, and it’s leather, sun, pain and cream and oil, but this time it’s everything, rushing into him in a tidal surge and filling up all the little holes that have festered. He has no idea how he ever thought he was whole, with all these nicks and cuts, these rents that go right through him. Whatever the Entity had done to him, it had cloaked even more; it had taken away his autonomy, his ability to comprehend that he was so damaged.

“Dean.” Just saying it is coming home. Just being here again, with him. For the first time, the eternity of the place Castiel helped build spins out before him, and he sags in Dean’s arms.

“Whoa, hey.” Dean catches him up, easy as anything. He tilts Castiel’s head back, fingers gliding over his face and searching through his hair. “Look at me. Look at me, are you hurt?”

“No.” 

They stare at each other, inches apart. Dean’s breath gusts over his face, and his green eyes go a little unfocused.

“There you are,” Dean whispers. He inhales, and Castiel hears it catch in his throat. The hand in Castiel’s hair tightens. “God, Cas.”

Castiel’s hands dig into the supple leather of his jacket. The last time he saw this jacket, they’d fought tooth and claw through a hellscape, and the air Castiel breathed, the light in his eyes and the dirt on his body were all nothing to the constant drumming beat: _whatever the cost, keep Dean alive. Dean lives. Dean lives._ He presses his face back into the warmth. Dean’s pulse flutters against his nose—another thing Dean doesn’t need up here, but the familiar _thuh-thump, thuh-thump_ beats through Castiel’s body, spurring his own heart to life again.

“I’m sorry,” he breathes, aware of all the hurts he has caused this man, but of one in particular.

“Told you, Cas. Jack…” Dean swallows. “He explained. This was never your fault.”

“The bunker was my fault.”

Dean goes very still. Castiel takes the moment to stroke Dean’s hair back from his forehead. To just look at him. “How could I have just left you there?”

Dean stops him, cups his chin. “You didn’t leave me. You saved me. You always save me.”

“It wasn’t my intention to hurt you.” A strange thing, to want so completely to take the words back, while at the same time to be so very grateful he’d spoken them aloud in that moment. “But I know I did.”

Dean’s thumb strokes Castiel’s temple. “There’s something I need to say to you.”

“You don’t need to.” In the Empty, he was cold to his center, and now Dean’s heat fills him up. Castiel grips Dean’s wrist and shuts his eyes, revels in the flutter of his pulse. He knows now what it took from Dean to speak the words the first time, what it always takes from Dean to speak his deepest truths. “I remember.”

But Dean just takes his face in both hands and tips Castiel’s head until their eyes lock. “Cas,” he says again, quiet and tired. “I don’t care that you remember. I’ll say this the way it was meant to be said, to you, until you hear it. Castiel, you have me. Alright? _You_ changed _me._ You gave me back my self. No one, not even Sam, was ever able to do that.” His voice breaks. “I need you. I miss you so damn much. I don’t want you in my Heaven anymore, I want it to be our Heaven, and I love you. I love you, too.” 

And it’s different, this soft, pointed truth pouring over him anew. The first time Dean spoke these words becomes a tattered memory; this one shines out, a fiery beacon on a dark shoreline.

Castiel searches his face and doesn’t know what he’s looking for until he suddenly finds it. It’s so obvious. He eases out of Dean’s grasp.

“Dean.” His heart is in his throat. “May I show you something?”

Dean eyes play over Castiel’s face, and his hands twitch where they now rest at his sides. But he nods, halting.

“You won’t need to shut your eyes this time,” Castiel murmurs, watches Dean’s face go slack in understanding, but by then Castiel is already holding his arms out and letting it fall.

The ease is glorious, exquisite, unendurable. He stretches free of the skin he has worn for so long, straining each wing as far into the heavens as it will go, reaching with every limb, opening every last eye upon the cosmos, rising up and up and up. He presses into air and earth alike, into water, into past, present, and future, into _thought,_ and from Dean, he hears— 

It shakes him. It shakes his foundations. 

He comes back dizzy, to find Dean fallen to his knees, hands half lifted and eyes filled with tears. For a moment Castiel fears he’s hurt him, even though he shouldn’t be able to, not here. But then Dean croaks:

“You’re _beautiful,_ Cas.”

Castiel goes to his knees before him, damp earth soaking into trouser legs, the tumble of his trench coat on the grass. He cradles Dean’s face and swipes his thumbs carefully over wet cheeks. Dean chokes out a sound, leans in, and they are kissing, on their knees in the field, Dean’s hands in his hair again and around his waist, clenching him closer until the heat of Dean’s soul winds its way around him. Dean tastes of shelter, and home, and of the sea.

 _I love you,_ Dean says, not in words. Not in words at all. He says it in light, all through Castiel where for so long it has been dark.

*

They lie in the field, for minutes or days, the scent of grass in Castiel’s nose and the lap of waves on the shore. Dean’s head rests warm on Castiel’s shoulder, his arm settled across Castiel’s chest, and the sky overhead is eggshell blue.

“Welcome home,” Dean murmurs, brushing Castiel’s jaw with his mouth.

*  
*  
*

_We are eagles of one nest;  
The nest is in our soul._

~fin~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End quote from _Ten Years Gone_ by Led Zeppelin.
> 
> .
> 
> It's Cas's POV, but of course I picture this extra scene that didn't make it in, where Jack comes to Dean in a dream or something and Dean is going absolutely spare:
> 
> _“I sent him back to the Empty.”_
> 
> _“You did what?” Dean shouts, so furious he sees white. “How could you do that?”_
> 
> _Jack’s face is sad, but resolute. “It’s the only way to get back what he has lost.”_
> 
> _Dean sucks in a sharp breath. He squares his shoulders. “Alright, then send me with him.”_
> 
> _“You can’t go there, Dean. Even as a bare soul, you’re still human.”_
> 
> _Dean presses a hand over his face and lets loose with a wordless, injured sound. It rings in his ears after, out of place in the quiet. “Why?” he demands. “Why can we never get a damn break?”_
> 
> _Jack doesn’t answer. It wasn’t aimed at Jack anyway._
> 
> _“Please,” he whispers at last. His hands are shaking. “I can’t let him go there alone. Not again.” The last time—He paces, but it claws through his blood until it’s bubbling like froth. He rakes his hands through his hair, then scrubs roughly at his face, he’s lost Cas, he’s lost him again, and he can’t, he cannot stay here, he’s about to tear right through this place. “Jack,” he grits out in warning._
> 
> _“Dean?” Jack touches him, soothes the panic. “Trust me. Please?”_
> 
> _Dean looks at him then, exhausted and vaguely surprised. “I do. I do, kid.” It’s true; he hasn’t had to lie about that in a long time. “It’s just…” He lifts his hands helplessly. “It’s Cas.”_
> 
> _“I know.” Something in Jack’s face darkens briefly before vanishing. “But have faith in him.”_
> 
> _Dean studies his hands for a long moment: hands that have absolutely no power here, in this. “And you'll get him out of there?”_
> 
> _Jack smiles. “Yes.”_
> 
> _“Alright.” It rushes out of him. He slumps onto his porch and heaves a deep, beaten breath. “Alright.”_
> 
> And then he waits.
> 
> Anyway. Thank you for reading!!!

**Author's Note:**

>  **Memory Loss tag:** The Empty takes the parts of Castiel's memories where he loves Dean. The Empty is a vindictive ass.
> 
> Thank you to coffeejunkii for your endlessly helpful feedback!


End file.
